ABSTRACT
Compilation of prompt books, performance texts, and rehearsal scripts is an active process. Scripts evolve, develop, contract, and expand during rehearsal and performance, and for many dramaturgs pre-production script compilation both looks ahead to the script’s future while acknowledging past productions and dramaturgical innovation. Literary critic Gérard Genette evocatively suggests that “the object of poetics is not the text but … its textual links with other texts” 2 : usefully, comparative analysis of extant texts, including manuscripts, drafts, prompt books, and ephemera, is one key to a dramaturg’s preparation. For classical dramaturgs, familiarity with past textual approaches – both iconic and local interpretations that might exist in an audience’s memory – offers the opportunity to learn from and speak to past adaptations. Further afield, textual benefits lie in historical comparison, which highlights the breadth of the great variety of copy-texts (both primary sources and re-edited editions) that might be considered in script compilation. Comparison of prompt books and staged texts can be a logistically elusive process, given that performance-reflective editions, when available, are difficult to manually contrast. This paper draws attention to the dramaturgical efficacy of digital parallel-text analysis, a textual approach which has heretofore rarely included working scripts.
